rules_python VS cxx

What's SV?

I honestly don't know why anyone would use that... as in what does Bazel do better than virtually anything else that can provide this functionality. But, I used to be an ops engineer in a big company which wanted everything to be Maven, regardless of whether it does it well or not. So we built and deployed with Maven a lot of weird and unrelated stuff.

Not impossible, but not anything I'd advise anyone to do on their free time.

Specifically wrt' the link you posted, if you look here: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_python/blob/main/python/... it says that only pure Python wheels are supported, but that's also a lie, they don't support half of the functionality of pure Python wheels.

So, definitely not worth using, since lots of functionality is simply not there.

Regarding bazel, the rules_python has a py_wheel rule that helps you creating wheels that you can upload to pypi (https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_python/blob/52e14b78307a...).

If you want to see an approach of bazel to pypi taken a bit to the extreme you can have a look at tensorflow on GitHub to see how they do it. They don't use the above-mentioned building rule because I think their build step is quite complicated (C/C++ stuff, Vida/ROCm support, python bindings, and multiOS support all in one before you can publish to pypi).

Python support in Bazel now looks more promising with `rules_python`: https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_python

`rules_go` to my understanding is great too.

Over years, Bazel is not as opinionated as before, mostly because adoptions in different orgs force it to be so.

I have personally run converted build systems to Bazel, and use it for personal projects as well.

Bazel 1.0 was released in October 2019. If you were using it "a few years ago", I'm guessing you were using a pre-1.0 version. There's not some cutoff where Bazel magically got easy to use, and I still wouldn't describe it as "easy", but the problem it solves is hard to solve well, and the community support for Bazel has gotten a lot better over the past years.

https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_python

The difficulty and complexity of using Bazel is highly variable. I've seen some projects where using Bazel is just super simple and easy, and some projects where using Bazel required a massive effort (custom toolchains and the like).

load("@bazel_tools//tools/build_defs/repo:http.bzl", "http_archive") #------------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Python #------------------------------------------------------------------------------ # enable python rules http_archive( name = "rules_python", url = "https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_python/releases/download/0.2.0/rules_python-0.2.0.tar.gz", sha256 = "778197e26c5fbeb07ac2a2c5ae405b30f6cb7ad1f5510ea6fdac03bded96cc6f", )

There are cxx and autocxx, what else do you propose to do?

I would like to see a comparison of how this compares to Rust. In terms of interoperability it has Cxx (https://cxx.rs) to offer safe bindings to C++ but also has great support for Android, Linux and many other systems. You don't even need to hack together Windows bindings (as explained in the blog post) because Microsoft offers official bindings (https://crates.io/crates/windows). I'm not sure if I'd call it a superpower if any potential interoperability has to be written to be used (compared to it already being available). Or rather, in comparison to what is interoperability a Swift superpower? Certainly not C++ or C which can be used in a far wider set of targets.

We selected Qt as a cross-platform solution. The C++/Rust interface is the clunkiest and ugliest part of the application, and rather complex because some state is shared between several windows in the GUI and several threads in the backend, and any component might modify that state at any time, and updates have to be transmitted to the other components without introducing inconsistencies. Using cxx [1] helped a little, though.

The project began in 2020, and I'm not sure what I'd choose as a GUI framework today – definitely not Qt Widgets, though.

[1] https://cxx.rs/

If the build process for the C library isn't too involved I recommend using cxx bridge (https://cxx.rs/) and letting cargo handle the build and linking. cxx basically allows you to describe the bidirectional interface (although it sounds like you only need 1 direction, which is fine too) in Rust code and it provides a "good enough" API for compiling C code inside the build.rs file.

The tooling for the first kind -- calling Rust from another language -- is a bit less developed, and tends to rely on code generation that doesn't necessarily produce a natural C API. cbindgen, uniffi, cxx, and Diplomat all take this course.

I would like to utilize OMPL's functionality in Rust code, so I want to call into OMPL C++ code somehow in Rust. I've seen two (non-mutually-exclusive) options so far: - rust-cpp, which allows you to write C++ code in Rust within the cpp!() macro. - cxx, which allows you to define both sides of the FFI boundary manually (as opposed to bindgen's automatic generation).

I'm not sure how to do this in cxx; issues like https://github.com/dtolnay/cxx/issues/447 suggest that this isn't settled yet?

I use non-vendored dependencies for the Buck build in https://github.com/dtolnay/cxx.

There's also the cpp and cxx crates for doing C++/Rust interop, but they probably aren't appropriate to use in all cases. The C ABI is definitely the safest way to go unless you're really trying to marry Rust and C++ code bases, not just writing library bindings.

There's also cxx (can't vouch for it personally but it claims to make things a lot easier) https://github.com/dtolnay/cxx